Join us at the Santa Cruz Mycoflora Project's Wild Mushroom Foray this December for a full weekend of lectures, workshops, mushroom tasting, and of course, mushroom collecting! Here in the southern stronghold of Redwoods, mid-December has been the most consistently productive time for mushroom variety and abundance in recent years. A good mix of fall species should overlap with early-winter groups like waxy caps, contributing to outstanding diversity.

Our preliminary lineup is headed by the inimitable Tom Volk, and will be accompanied by a lineup of fungal luminaries including Steve Trudell (author of Mushrooms of the Pacific Northwest). More speakers and educators will be added as confirmations come in, so stay tuned! Noah Siegel and Christian Schwarz will lead field trips and teach workshops covering tips and tricks for identifying California mushrooms, and for using Mushrooms of the Redwood Coast. Milton Tam will lead a build-your-own Oyster Mushroom cultivation kit workshop, and Chad Hyatt will give a mushroom cooking demonstration and tasting including some lesser-known delicious edible species.

Help us learn about the marvelous mushrooms of this spectacular bioregion – our findings will support the Santa Cruz Mycoflora Project, and we'll be using citizen science tools like iNaturalist to pair with our vouchered specimens for the UC Santa Cruz collections. Participants will no doubt find mushrooms that we've never documented for this area – every year, new species are added to the Santa Cruz County mycoflora.